Thursday, December 4, 2014

Claire Cain Miller reports that Americans are staying
married longer. The wave of divorces that began in the 1970s is tapering off.

Statistically, this means that instead of a divorce rate of
approximately 50% we anticipate a divorce rate of 33%.

It’s getting better, but still the rate is far too high.

Miller also points out that Americans are marrying less. Thus, many Americans lack the stability that a long term marriage would provide.

The less educated among us have discovered that it is
perfectly OK not to marry, but to have children with different partners. The
resulting social chaos ought to bother everyone. It is not a formula for social harmony.

All of this is what it is. It is not the reason I was
intrigued by Miller’s story.

Miller also raises a more interesting issue: Was feminism
responsible for the wave of divorces that washed up on our shores in the 1970s?
Or was it all the fault of men who refused to buckle under to their wives’ new
demands?

Were feminists really home-wreckers or did American men fail
to adapt to changing mores?

Following the lead of researchers Betsey Stevenson and
Justin Wolpers, Miller attempts to absolve feminism of responsibility for the
chaos it produced:

The
people who married soon before the feminist movement were caught in the
upheaval. They had married someone who was a good match for the postwar culture
but the wrong partner after times changed. Modern marriage is more stable
because people are again marrying people suitable to the world in which we
live.

This is seriously disingenuous, though it does show that feminists
are incapable of taking responsibility for what their movement produced.

Marriage is a contract. Some of it is explicit; some of it
is implicit; some of it is customary. Once a couple establishes a domestic
division of labor, it becomes part of the contract.

People who marry
agree to live by the terms of the contract. When second-wave feminism convinced
large numbers of women to break their part of the contract, to go back on their
word, it produced an upheaval. It had to.

The result was a large number of divorces and what was
called the feminization of poverty. Airy visions notwithstanding, divorce is
not good for women… or for anyone else, either.

It was more about the culture than about equal legal rights. It was about the way women conducted their lives. Feminism declared that
traditional ways of dating and mating, or courting and marrying were oppressive
to women. They had a right to their opinion. But then, they told women to opt
out of traditional marriages and traditional courtship. The result: more divorce,
more unwillingness to marry, more hooking up, more sexual abuse… and so on.

Feminists take grievous offense at any suggestion that their
movement might be responsible for the ensuing chaos. They do not like being
called home-wreckers.

And yet, as Colin Powell famously said: you break it; you
own it. Those who broke the old ways of dating and mating are responsible for
what ensued… even if it was not what they intended.

Shifting the blame by accusing people of having married
unsuitable mates is absurd. The point is not whether your mate is suitable or
not. The point is that a lot of women changed the rules… unilaterally.

When someone breaches a contract you do not say that she made a deal with someone who was unsuitable. When someone decides to change
the rules you do not accuse her mate of being overly rigid.

Following Stevenson and Wolpers, Miller refuses to blame
feminism for anything that has gone wrong since women started living by its
dictates.

Instead, in an impressive sleight-of-hand Miller suggests
that feminism really saved marriage… by making it all about love.

Or better, she follows the lead of the researchers who
declare that marriage has evolved:

Women
entered the work force, many of their chores in the home became automated and
they gained reproductive rights, as the economist Betsey Stevenson and Mr.
Wolfers have argued in their
academic work. As a
result, marriage has evolved to its modern-day form, based on love and shared
passions, and often two incomes and shared housekeeping duties.

“It’s
just love now,” Mr. Wolfers said. “We marry to find our soul mate, rather than
a good homemaker or a good earner.”

In fact, this was always the feminist promise. It’s good to
see it stated so explicitly and so mindlessly.

In the feminist fiction a woman who ran out on her husband and
children to go to graduate school will find her soul mate, discover true love
and live happily ever after. See Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room.

Feminism did not concern itself with whether or not it was morally
reprehensible to abandon husband, home and children.

In another feminist fiction a woman should delay marriage in
favor of career. Then she will be so independent that she will not depend on a man for
anything. Thus, when she chooses to get married in her
mid-thirties she will find a man who can love her for herself alone… and not
for her tuna casseroles. Since she does not depend on him they can love
each other as equals.

By now most women know the foolishness of this life plan.
But, the reproductive endocrinologists have certainly profited from it.

We did not need second-wave feminism to give us love
marriage. By my count it originated in the sixteenth century with the
Protestant Reformation and became institutionalized in Great Britain in the
seventeenth century.

To be clear, it meant that civilization had advanced beyond
arranged marriage. As I discussed in my book The Last Psychoanalyst, the important part about love marriage was
that it gave a woman a free choice of a husband and held her responsible for
the way she conducted herself in her marriage.

Anyone who believes that marriage is simply the union of two
soul mates is either an adolescent or a propagandist. Witness the fate of
Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde.

One reason people marry less is that some women refuse to be
homemakers and some men do not want to marry until they can support their
families. Also some women refuse to marry men who cannot provide for them.

Ignoring these things when you choose a mate is a formula
for trouble. One suspects that some young people think that it’s all about
love. That’s the reason why, even in a culture where marriages are not
arranged, parental guidance often plays a role in the selection process.

And, lest we overlook it, some research has shown that a
couple that shares household chores is 50% more likely to divorce. A marriage
where both members of the couple contribute equally to the family coffers is
twice as likely to contain abuse.

Moreover, when a couple shares all household chores and
childrearing tasks equally, one or both will be sacrificing career advancement. This
too is not a formula for a happy and durable marriage.

Finally, when estimating the divorce rate we must keep in
mind parents today know that feminists were lying to them. They know that
children suffer from divorce. Thus, they often try to keep their marriages
together while their children are growing up. Responsible adults, they make choices
based on the best interest of someone other than themselves.

18 comments:

The 50 percent divorce rate was always a lie or a misunderstanding of statistics and the inferences that can be made from them. http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/d/divorce.htm#.VIB4J4u4kdUIt is the shabby scholarship in these articles that make one wonder about the credibility that should be given to people who obviously have an agenda and will dissemble to prove a point that lacks validity.In a funny way feminism did improve marriage by demonstrating how wrong they were about every thing. The more women became alienated from feminism the better their marriages became. Though the last thing feminists wanted was stable marriages because the women in those marriage overwhelmingly vote in a manner not conducive to feminism.This has as much validity as Planned Parenthood stating that killing Black children is wrong given their avocation of abortion which affects Blacks at a much higher rate. Margret Sanger anyone?

IMO, feminist denial of their complicity in divorce is part of a package of denials proffered in response to pressure.

A number of canaries are starting to screech in the feminist coalmine, and young women (like the ones at WomenAgainstFeminism) are starting to notice. This has presented feminism with a sales&marketing problem regarding a core constituency, and feminists are making adjustments accordingly in order to escape being tagged with the blame for these breakdowns.

One such canary is the creation of what may be a VERY large cohort of women who will never marry. Here's a link to a piece on that trend in the UK:

Then there's the rise in the number of women who will be raising their children alone. In 1950, single-parent families were 7 percent of families with children under 18; by 2013, they were 31 percent.

Another canary: men are fleeing college campuses. For all their bombast, young women at college are very much aware that Susan Patton was right... they will never again have access to so many eligible young men. Schools are struggling to keep the percentage of men from falling below the magic 40% mark because (for one reason) otherwise the school will be unable to attract top women students. Top women students have choice, and can go anywhere they want.

Writings like the books like "Men On Strike" are helping pull the sheet off of these feminist outcomes. Worse for feminists, these writings are explaining that men who choose to leave the building are acting rationally, to protect their futures and their own interests. To escape responsibility, feminists are portraying these men as ineffectual losers running away from a world that is changing for the better.

And so it goes. Being a single mother is "empowering". Starting the search for a husband in one's 30's is a feature, not a bug of the feminist life-plan. Spin, deny, deflect, project, misdirect.

A few years ago, I read the comment (by a feminist, IIRC) to the effect that "Feminism's greatest failing was that it alienated men". These days, there's a full-scale charm offensive underway because feminists have discovered they need men to support and subsidize the next wave of feminist hegemony. So, many feminists have now calculated that is expedient to wage peace against men in hopes of rendering men willingly complicit in their own demasculinization, disenfranchisement, and exploitation. There's a whole lotta recalibration goin' on. Escaping blame for negative outcomes is an important part of that aggression.

Re arranged marriages, love marriages, etc...Michael Chevalier, a French engineer who visited the US circa 1833, observed that Americans were the most money-obsessed people he had ever met..but that, paradoxically, this obsession allowed them to be much more romantic than the French when it came to marriage

“I ought to do the Americans justice on another point. I have said that with them everything was an affair ofmoney; yet there is one thing which among us, a people of lively affections…takes the mercantile character very decidedly and which among them has nothing of this character; I mean marriage. We buy a woman with our fortune or we sell ourselves to her for her dowry. The American chooses her, or rather offers himself to her, for her beauty, her intelligence, or her amiable qualities and asks no other portion. Thus, while we make a traffic of what is most sacred, these shopkeepers exhibit a delicacy and loftiness of feeling which would have done honor to the most perfect models of chivalry.”

One tiny criticism - the main character in The Women's Room does leave her husband and children, go to grad school, and find love with a younger man, but it ends when she realizes that he wants a family with her, and she won't consider it. She ends up teaching at a small town community college, and walking the beach alone.